Go Ahead in the Rain

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  It helps that he was a visionary and that he was ambitious, and it helps that he couldn’t fathom failure as an option for A Tribe Called Quest, which did lead to him dragging the band along to and through his vision, no matter what it was.

  But it was easy for me to blame Q-Tip, flawed as the premise might have been. I imagined the toll his relentless vision may have taken on everyone else around him. I remembered a shot from a Yo! MTV Raps interview in 1991: in a hallway, A Tribe Called Quest is being interviewed before they go on stage. Q-Tip has his arms around host Fab Five Freddy, eagerly rapping into his mic while Ali Shaheed Muhammad holds another mic in Q-Tip’s face. Q-Tip is energetic, talking with excitement about the group’s tour and album, while Phife, walking several steps ahead, stares blankly into space, almost invisible to the viewer.

  There is more to it than this, of course. Q-Tip and Phife had a complex relationship, made more complex by the fact that they had known each other for their entire lives—since the age of two years old. What is hard to do is imagine a world in which someone you have loved—before you knew what love is—has to balance that love with whatever ambitions they have for a journey you set out on together. I don’t know what it was like for Q-Tip to have to fight to get Phife into the studio during the first few albums, and I don’t know what it was like for Phife to feel that he wasn’t able to get any creative control of the vision he had for the group and its music. But I know that sometimes you have to pull away from your brother in order for you to keep looking at him like he is your brother.

  I stopped blaming Q-Tip nearly a year after the group broke up, when it became clear that they weren’t getting back together. The two hardly spoke of each other, and they didn’t seem too interested in being in the same worlds anymore. It was both tragic and understandable.

  In my bedroom, I went through a phase where I cut out pictures from magazines, or tore old magazine covers off and taped them to my wall. This was in the early 2000s, when magazine covers were arguably at their best and most absurd. By that time, I had subscribed to ESPN the Magazine and Slam magazine, and XXL magazine came to my house. Everyone on every cover was larger than life, plastered against some wild background or paired with some animal: Ma$e with a tiger or basketball player Kevin Garnett with a wolf. It’s like the magazines catering to black people finally had the eyes and resources and capital to catch up with what Rolling Stone had been doing with covers for decades.

  I hung the old Tribe cover of The Source somewhere above my bed. I’m reminded of how black magazines lean first on sight before trying to stimulate any of the other senses. A small magazine started by one black man and some furniture as collateral started a movement once, they say. They don’t all do that, of course. But sometimes they provide an image that haunts you, be it a frozen soul icon or the whites of Q-Tip’s eyes against so much darkness. Asking for forgiveness, maybe, but still with a bit of hope. As if he’d grown tired of watching everything he built drown slowly, and decided to finally stop fighting against the water and trying to save it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lament

  DEAR PHIFE,

  Do you know that it wasn’t the ball trickling through Bill Buckner’s legs that lost the Red Sox the 1986 World Series? It’s funny, isn’t it—the things that play on our screens and in our heads for years, detached from any fullness. Maybe you remember this. It helped deliver a World Series to your beloved Queens. But I’m going to talk to you for a second like you don’t remember. I’m going to talk to you like this isn’t about facts, but about memory.

  Bill Buckner should maybe not even have been on the field for that game six. Bill Buckner was an All-Star once, in 1981. My college roommate had a dad who loved Bill Buckner. Or maybe my college roommate had a dad who felt sorry for Bill Buckner. I’m always thinking about the distance between love and sympathy, Phife. How quickly one can feel like the other in the right light, or in the right season, or with the right song acting as its anchor. But this isn’t about love. I’m saying that I, too, felt bad for Bill Buckner once, because I thought he lost an entire city its closest hope at a World Series. This was before the 2000s, when the Red Sox won it all and became dominant. This was when there was still talk of the curse, and we know how it is with sports and scapegoats.

  Earlier that year, in January of 1986, the temperature in South Florida unexpectedly dropped to twenty degrees overnight. This would have been an unspectacular flash of weather if not for an O-ring attached to the Challenger space shuttle. The rings were designed to keep pressurized hydrogen out of the rocket boosters, and because the shuttle was launching from Florida, engineers stopped just short of testing to see if the O-rings would function in cold weather. The O-ring, as it turns out, stopped functioning at any temperature below forty degrees. The Challenger, seventy-three seconds into its flight, converted into a bomb, killing everyone on board. If Florida hadn’t had a record-low morning, or if one engineer would have thought to test at any temperature below forty degrees, the Challenger is a success story instead of a tragedy.

  What I’m saying, Phife, is that sometimes, it’s just the one thing. In life, but rarely in sports. In sports, it’s the melting pot of several things, boiled down into one digestible highlight of a thing. In the 1986 World Series, Bill Buckner was batting .143. He was 0 for 5 in game six, before the ball rolled through his legs. He had been failing on defense throughout the series. Dave Stapleton had been coming in as his defensive replacement in the later innings all playoffs long, but for some reason, that didn’t happen here. When the game went into extra innings, Buckner was still in the game.

  You know how this goes, Phife. Everything is a game of small movements—of jolts and bumps and unexpected turns. A baseball is thrown at one hundred miles an hour, and then comes off a bat, speeding along uneven ground. In the moment, anything can take a player briefly away from their focus. The thought of someone they love, the idea of being a hero before completing the heroic task, the fear of what might befall them if they don’t complete said task. It’s all so impossible to keep up with. I don’t blame Bill Buckner as much as I blame the impossibility of the moments so many of us are asked to rise to, when we would likely be better off playing catch in the backyard or kicking freestyles with our brothers in the basement inside a home where we first heard the songs our parents sang falling from their mouths while a record played.

  It was game six, anyway. No one ever mentions that part, do they? I get it. I know. It’s easier to point at the one thing. But it’s never just the one thing in sports. Even if Buckner would have executed the play, the game would have simply gone to another inning, and then who knows, right? I’m saying that I’m an optimist, overwhelmed with sympathy for those who touched the hem of greatness but then let it slip through their fingers. Bill Buckner was 2 for 4 in game seven and scored a run. But it didn’t matter. New York still won. No one talks about game seven, though. But I’m sure you knew that. Maybe you were a kid who celebrated the Mets winning a World Series and maybe you threw back your head to laugh at the misfortune of Bill Buckner, as I would have if I were in Queens, New York, and young, and a lover of sports as you were. We take what we can where we can, Phife. I guess that’s what I’m saying. I guess I’m saying mercy is something I’ve reserved for even the people who surely don’t need it from me, and I’m wondering if you’ve ever done the same.

  I heard the album that no one listened to and I played it over and over again during the fall of 2000. I got it, Phife. Ventilation: Da LP. You had things to get off your chest, and who wouldn’t? You were done being the punch-line-heavy comedic foil of a group that you felt distant from, finally. I loved that on the cover you wore a Jets jersey with your name on the back, because it was the early 2000s when everyone wore jerseys, and the Jets had the best ones in the game. I loved how bitter you sounded, Phife. I always wanted you to sound like you wanted to prove yourself again. I get that you thought you didn’t get your shine, and I believed you then, and I believed
you always. I saw you in the interviews, sometimes bursting at your edges to speak, only to be drowned out. I saw you in photos, playing the background. What you gave in song was so much larger than what you were asked to give outside of it. I was thankful for your anger, Malik. I played Ventilation for my friends who loved Tribe but didn’t believe any of you could make it on your own, and none of them believed in you, but I did. You only get to be the underdog once, you know. You only get to fight back from something that seems insurmountable one good time before people get tired of seeing you do it, and I loved you for trying. I loved you the way I loved my hand, balled into a tight fist and thrown at the jaw of a bully in my ninth grade year, the year my older and bigger brother and I weren’t at the same school and I became a target. I loved you the way I loved the way the grass felt as I fell to my knees after upsetting the greatest high school soccer team in my league when I was a senior, nearly a year after Ventilation had come and gone.

  I don’t know why people did not love your solo album, Phife, but I did. I loved the soaring and swooning production, and I loved how focused you sounded on it. It is easy to pretend now that you were never interesting enough to sustain a solo career, but we both know that’s a lie. And maybe I was just always cheering for you because, in some ways, cheering for you felt like cheering for myself. And we both needed that.

  Phife, it is late now, in a whole other year beyond the one where you gave the world your album, and I can’t find it anywhere. They took it out of print, and I wish I knew why. I found it in an old CD shop in New York once, and they were selling it for $30. When I talk to people about it now, no one remembers it, or talks about it the way I did when I spent an entire season playing it from start to finish. I think a lot about what it means to take an album out of print, and how it erases a small part of an artist’s past. And this was it for you—your big payback, the loudest thing you made, which no one heard.

  The term “commercial failure” is only the tip of the iceberg, and the rest is not built so well underneath. You get what I’m saying now, Phife. You and I, we’re sports fans. We know all the drama and narrative of success and failure and wins and losses. Ventilation is the ball that skipped through your legs, but it was never your fault. You were at the mercy of unfair machinery, the same way Bill Buckner was at the mercy of an unpredictable and unforgiving plot of land, and a ball that decided its own destiny.

  But I think fools believe in curses, don’t you? Some teams are just bad, some shots just miss, and some albums just aren’t met with the hands they deserve to be met with.

  But people only remember the big things, the things they can point at—in joy or in some type of defeat. Here’s another one that I know you know already, Phife, but I am going to talk to you like you maybe don’t remember, because some people out there don’t, and I’m talking to them as much as I’m talking to you, anyway.

  When Willis Reed limped out onto the court in the 1970 NBA Finals, the game seven was perhaps already won for your beloved Knicks. Willis Reed only played the first half, though, scoring two buckets and harassing Wilt Chamberlain into a bad offensive outing. But what won the game was Willis Reed limping onto the court. That’s all people remember. That’s all people talk about. That’s the bright thing that people point at, and it almost doesn’t even matter what Reed’s statistics were. He came out on a bad leg and stood, and that was good enough.

  I don’t know where you are or what you are doing these days, but I do hope that you’ll find a tunnel to limp out of soon, Phife. I do hope that we remember you always for your fight and not your failure. I paid $30 for the old copy of Ventilation that I found in that New York CD shop, because I didn’t know if I’d ever find a copy again, and I refuse to let that album die. I’ll still play it for people who think that you didn’t have a solo career worth celebrating, just because no one was there to call you a genius. Some will remember it as the ball going through your legs, but I’ll remember it as you limping out of the tunnel and standing.

  I know you get where I’m coming from. We’re sports fans, you and I.

  DEAR ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD,

  You will be pleased to know that we did in fact dance to Lucy Pearl underneath the fluorescent lights of Beechcroft High School’s gym during a lunch period sock hop that had no business taking place in an afternoon when some of us had to get back to class right after, but we did it anyway. There is something about showing up in a place of learning with fresh sweat sitting on your skin from the flailing of your body up against something as immovable as a school day with more school left on the other side of your flailing.

  Did you ever think people would dance to you anywhere you crawled out of a speaker? There’s something black about this urgency, sure. But I must imagine you saw it, perhaps in a dream. Wherever there is a day when people are living, there might not be one after it, and so I will not waste the capabilities my legs still have, you know?

  It was the song “Dance Tonight,” and I recall this because I have never heard it again as I did in that moment and, Ali, I was an awkward and nervous kid and I maybe could not dance as well as I thought I could dance (but who can?), and it was the end of the 1990s and I had never kissed a girl I actually liked, and when I say fluorescent lights, what I really mean is that someone turned out all the lights in the auditorium and dragged in a couple of stage lights from the spring production of Romeo and Juliet, and our drama teacher was really mad about it, but by the time he found out, the song was already being played on repeat for its third time and there are some parties you just don’t want to stop, even if they are being built on the back of the things you consider sacred.

  I kissed someone I liked during the fourth time I heard the first verse, and she liked me back—or at least she liked me back in that moment. I’m saying that you built a world for me then, like you always did. What I have always loved about you, Ali, is that you were a builder of soft spaces for anyone who needed them. What you never got enough credit for was the way you made even silence a commodity.

  I kissed someone I liked during the first verse of “Dance Tonight,” which I was hearing for the fourth time in a row, and I retreated to a classroom that afternoon, baptized in sweat and whatever a teenager imagines as love, and I let the song rattle around in my head for hours, tied to the end of countless possibilities.

  And you maybe don’t need to know that the girl I kissed transferred schools shortly thereafter and we never saw each other again, and maybe the kiss was both of us having the idea of taking a big risk before the world as we knew it changed. But I’m telling you that anyway, and I’m telling you so that you know every time I hear that song I think of a moment when I was not afraid. I think of a moment when I truly escaped into the urgency that it was pulling from me. It’s a song that demands that. It’s a song that asks us to do what we might do if we knew we were going to die the next day.

  Ali, what was it about Dawn Robinson that made all of us fall for her, and did you fall, as I did? As your brother Phife did when he rapped I used to have a crush on Dawn from En Vogue in “Oh My God?” It’s funny how things come full circle like this, without our even knowing. In the video for “Dance Tonight,” there is Dawn, dancing in a room full of dancers and still making it look effortless. In the video for “Don’t Mess with My Man,” there is Dawn again. There are all of you, actually. Sweaty, but just the right amount of sweaty. The kind that doesn’t seem like it would be uncomfortable during a rooftop party at the end of summer. And here I was, wanting Lucy Pearl to never end. I heard the story once about how D’Angelo was supposed to be in the band instead of Dawn, but no. I think the Gods got this one right. Something echoed down and got this one as right as it could ever have been.

  Speaking of our Gods. My middle name is Muhammad—the same name that anchors your own. I sometimes thought it was because my parents ran out of cool ideas after having three children before me. I am saddled with the name of the Prophet, as you are. As many are. What a way to be part of
a religion—to have yourself named after the greatest prophet the faith has to offer.

  Of all the stories we hear in Muslim households—and I’m sure you’ve heard as many as I have, if not more—the one I return to most is the story of the Archangel Gabriel coming to Muhammad and demanding that he read. He couldn’t read, but the angel held him close and demanded again that he read, and the words just came to him, like they had been there all along. I don’t know where you are with your faith or if you, like me, have spent countless days, hours, and months praying and losing hope and then finding it somewhere else. But I don’t know if I’m talking about faith or God here as much as I’m talking about what it is to offer someone sight where there was no sight.

  I wonder if you listen to things with your eyes closed sometimes, as I do. I am wondering if in the summer, you climb to the rooftops and put on headphones and let a world be built around you, a world better than whatever one you’re currently in. I open my windows in summer and let the breeze in while music plays. Last summer, it was hot, and not the romantic kind of hot. It was the kind of hot where you sweat and the sweat comes on heavy the minute you step out of the door. But I still opened my windows one night and just let the sweat arrive. I played the Lucy Pearl album. It’s a relic now, but you should know that when I closed my eyes, I still saw everything just as I think you intended it. It was all blue. Everything hanging under some stolen lights made newly fluorescent. A room so packed that no one could move but for their frantic dancing.